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About urbanriot

Luis, your response doesn't contribute to resolving my issue as I'm well aware, like the plethora of other people successfully utilizing WD Green drives in a RAID configuration for home servers, of TLER and WDIDLE and all the other little nuances of using consumer level drives in 'enterprise' configurations.
Your post reads more of a shill for Western Digital's higher priced drives rather than a technical response from an employee of Adaptec with technical insight.
If you have technical insight, perhaps you could tell me if a drive with a higher TLER setting hitting a high latency or bad sector would cause the controller to behave exactly as I illustrated, 'jamming up' the card entirely and breaking all RAID arrays. I know, based on experience, that LSI based cards do not behave in a similar fashion when they hit a bad spot, they simply drop the drive out of the array (and sometimes take your array offline).

I'm hoping someone has some advice as I'd really like to transfer a pile of data to a larger array...
6 x Western Digital WD30EZRX Green drives in RAID5 configuration jumpered for 3 GB/s
Connected to Adaptec 6405 with latest 19076 firmware
Drives plugged into Intel expander AXX6DRXEXP with latest 2.18 firmware
(listed in Adaptec Compatibility Report - http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/compatibility_report/arc-sas_cr_03-27-12_series6.pdf)
I create my array, create a partition, start copying and things are fine... a half hour or an hour goes by and the system jams up and I can barely click anything. On the hot swap bay, one drive has a solid green light and I can possibly click continually on applications to try and shut down, then after waiting a good half hour I pull the plug. This has happened four times now.
Previously I had the same model drives plugged into this card with a four drive multilane cable without an expander and there were no issues.
I swapped out the expander with an identical one and I have the same issue.
The card or drives are well within 'normal' temperatures.
Does anyone have any advice? Thanks in advance!

A number of us that personally host large amounts of data on personal servers in our homes, as opposed to highly available business servers we administer at work, picked up some Areca controllers due to their high performance and low cost; however we all had issues at random times and sold our cards on various forums, issues that involved intuitive solutions in hidden menus and bizarre issues requiring rebuilds of disjointed arrays for no apparent issues. Support is accessible although their directions aren't always... articulately clear, concerning English.
Most of us moved to Adaptec and have been happy with the reliability and compatibility with drives. This was back in 2008 - 2009 so it's possible their products and their support has changed.

Felt it necessary to update this thread as Western Digital has pulled a 'fast one' on many of our previously stated 5 year warranty enterprise drives.
Original WD5000ABYS drive warrantied until 2014 was replaced with an enterprise drive that had a build date of August, 2011 last summer. Okay, great, it looks like a new drive with newer date, it's not a refurb, must be under warranty for a long time.
Fast forward about 8 months and the drive has failed. Warranty expired December, 2011 (! four months after the build date)
I decided to scrounge through our paperwork and pull up the original serial number of the first replaced drive and it's coming up as "Out of region" with a description, "Product is outside the region (Americas, Europe-Middle East-Africa, or Asia-Pacific) where it was originally shipped." Yeaaa... not exactly.
So, to add to my previous post it seems that Western Digital lies as they do not transfer the warranty as their representatives stated and if you do not retain your paperwork, you lose your warranty if your drive breaks under warranty. So far none of our January RMA'd drives have retained their original warranty.
I'm going to try and RMA this recent drive and relay what the representatives state concerning warranty.
Again, save all RMA paperwork, packing slips, communications when dealing with Western Digital.

We've since audited all our RMA'd drives for all our recent customers and as it turns out, none of them have had their warranties transferred. We have at least 20 drives here from the past few months with lesser warranties than the original drives.
We've instituted a new RMA policy where we record serial numbers of both drives to ensure someone doesn't lose their warranty.

This might be common sense for some, but many may forget to check this...
If you RMA a newer drive with a warranty expiry date of 2015, your advance replacement drive may be out of warranty and your warranty will not be automatically transferred.
I had an issue last month that involved a great deal of paperwork investigating, as I had an original NCIX invoice, the original WD HD serial number of a drive that was purchased a year ago. The replacement drive arrived and I decided on a whim to check the refurb's warranty date; the drive was out of warranty! I called up Western Digital and even though I had all of the above information, they needed more so I dug up the original RMA paperwork and they transferred the warranty.
I called today to have them transfer the warranty on two drives that are not quite 'case closed' as they haven't received ours yet, and the representative recorded my information, put me on hold for a few minutes and then I was told they made a note of the information and the warranty data will be updated once they receive our drives. So, if I hadn't called... the replacement drives would be out of warranty.
Time will tell if they actually do what they'd said they'd made a note to do and I'll update once I find out.
But, as a reminder, make sure you transfer the warranty from your previous drive to your refurb drive.

It means whatever's the cheapest that's not absolute crap or Areca.
For example, I pull up RAID5 capable SAS cards with Synnex here in Canada, and everything's starts at a little over the $300 CA mark. If that's what I gotta spend, that's what I gotta spend; but I'd like to hear some suggestions as to what's good and cheap at that range, if that's the range.

I'm in need of, as cost effective as possible, a RAID5 card that supports 3TB physical drives. I only need 4 ports but I also have SAS expanders if there's a SAS controller that's a good bang for the buck. I currently have a few Intel based units that are based on LSI controllers, unfortunately they're so behind on the times that even the latest cards aren't supporting 3TB drives.
Anyone have any advice? Much appreciated.

A year or so ago, Western Digital RMA'd me back a WD800ADFD drive with the plastic missing from the SATA data cable, which was bizarre, and they wouldn't take it back as they claimed it was external damage. So I left it off to the side for a rainy day. Today WD refused to RMA a 74GB Raptor with a manufacturing date of Dec, 2007 as they said it was a factory replacement; interestingly it didn't have 'recertified stamped on it' but perhaps it was a replacement for a failed 36GB drive that wasn't stamped recertified.
So, back story aside, I removed the drives' circuit boards and transferred the WD740ADFD (failed drive) board to the WD800ADFD and now have a working hard drive from two non-working drives. 80GB drive shows correctly in the BIOS as exactly what it is, MHDD tests the drive out fine, SMART reports that all is well... except this 80GB drive shows up as 74GB capacity.
WD740ADFD-00NLR1 circuit board with firmware 20.07P20 --> WD800ADFD-00NLR1
Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but is there a flash available, anywhere, to increase the drive by 6GB?
Thanks in advance!